Saturday, December 28, 2013

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle met with eight
moms at the White House last week to establish a nebulous cultural
association between domestic nurturing and the Affordable Care Act, with
the President entreating mothers everywhere to become community
organizers for Obamacare the next time they’re in the cereal aisle.

“There’s something about moms,” said the President.
“Nothing can replace telling stories in the grocery store to somebody
who may be skeptical. And that kind of face-to-face interaction makes
this concrete and it describes exactly why this is so important.”

“The words I think of are ‘peace of mind,’” the first lady added.

“Every family needs the peace of mind to know they’re going to have the
safety net they need. As Barack said, these stories are powerful… I’d
urge everyone out there who has a story to share it.”

According to Valerie Jarrett, who says she doesn’t really hold much sway with the Obamas anyway, “The first lady is the best salesperson” for Obamacare.

She’s getting involved now, Jarrett said, because she’s
the right person to convey the message of the moment: that the uninsured
— especially young people and minorities — should look for insurance on
exchanges and that those with insurance are already feeling the
benefits of the law.

As this phase continues, Obama will speak out more on health care,
Jarrett said. People familiar with the White House’s plans expect more
engagement by the first lady in 2014.

The timing of her involvement, after controversies have eased and ahead of the holidays, is no accident.

“There is no question that they wanted to keep her away from the mess
[of] it,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist who has a good
relationship with the East Wing.

“Now that things have started to smooth
out and they’ve been able to get to a point of focusing more on the
benefits and those folks who are able to sign up for insurance, it’s the
right moment for the first lady to get involved.”

The right moment. Sure, be our guest.

At least right now, perhaps the first lady would like to rethink her
grocery-gossip advice. She probably doesn’t want somebody’s mom to share
this story. Or this one. Or this one right here. And speaking of domestic nurturing, for heaven’s sake, don’t let anybody’s mom share this one. Heck, why not? Here are four more. And, unless Michelle and Barack are going for irony, the grocery store probably isn’t the ideal venue to share this story, or this one — especially if a store employee is within earshot.

This fall’s website fiasco and policy cancellations are only the
beginning. Next spring the individual mandate is likely to unravel when
we see how sick the people are who signed up on exchanges, and if our
government really is going to penalize voters for not buying health
insurance. The employer mandate and “accountable care organizations”
will take their turns in the news. There will be scandals. There will be
fraud. This will go on for years.

Yet opponents should not sit back and revel in dysfunction. …Without a
clear alternative, we will simply patch more, subsidize more, and
ignore frauds and scandals, as we do in Medicare and other programs.

So what should be done?

Professor Cochrane points out that the healthcare system isn’t a free
market now and it wasn’t a free market when Obamacare was imposed.

Instead, it’s one of the most heavily government-controlled sectors of our economy.

The U.S. health-care market is dysfunctional. Obscure prices and $500
Band-Aids are legendary. The reason is simple: Health care and health
insurance are strongly protected from competition. There are explicit
barriers to entry, for example the laws in many states that require a
“certificate of need” before one can build a new hospital. Regulatory
compliance costs, approvals, nonprofit status, restrictions on foreign
doctors and nurses, limits on medical residencies, and many more
barriers keep prices up and competitors out. Hospitals whose main
clients are uncompetitive insurers and the government cannot innovate
and provide efficient cash service.

He then explains how a market could operate – if it was allowed.

A much freer market in health care and health insurance can work, can
deliver high quality, technically innovative care at much lower cost,
and solve the pathologies of the pre-existing system. …We’ll know we are
there when prices are on hospital websites, cash customers get
discounts, and new hospitals and insurers swamp your inbox with
attractive offers and great service. …Only deregulation can unleash
competition. And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive
out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs and innovation.

If this sounds familiar, it may be that you watched this video from Reason TV on market-based hospitalization. And if you haven’t, you should!

Cochrane writes that deregulation will enable the “creative destruction” that brings progress in other parts of the economy.

We need to permit the Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and
Apples of the world to bring to health care the same dramatic
improvements in price, quality, variety, technology and efficiency that
they brought to air travel, retail and electronics. …Health insurance
should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers;
lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to
continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick.
Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary
expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine
expenses. People want to buy this insurance, and companies want to sell
it. It would be far cheaper, and would solve the pre-existing conditions
problem. We do not have such health insurance only because it was
regulated out of existence.

Needless to say, Obamacare is the opposite a free market. It assumes
that you solve government-created problems by adding additional layers
of government.

The Affordable Care Act bets…that more regulation, price controls,
effectiveness panels, and “accountable care” organizations will force
efficiency, innovation, quality and service from the top down. Has this
ever worked?

Cochrane has the right diagnosis and right cure, but that’s the easy
part. The real challenge is implementing the policies that would restore
a functioning market.

That requires reforms to Medicare and Medicaid,
not only to save money for taxpayers, but also because those are some
of the steps that are needed if we want market forces to bring down the
cost of healthcare.

Health care liberalization also means a flat tax,
not only for the pro-growth impact of lower tax rates, but also because
it gets rid of the internal revenue code’s healthcare exclusion, thus
ending the distortion that encourages over-insurance.

It means state-by-state battles to get rid of regulations, mandates,
and other forms of intervention that hinder competition and markets.

They say that even long journeys begin with a single step. That’s true, but it’s also important to walk in the right direction.

That hasn’t happened in recent decades, so it’s time to scrub the slate
clean. We need free markets, not more government. We need more consumer
sovereignty, not more third-party payer.

Maybe somebody should fix him up with Julia. I’m guessing they wouldn’t even know how to reproduce without intervention, handouts, and subsidies, so that would be an additional way of improving the gene pool.

The Debt Limit and the White House

"Understand
– raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money.
It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress
has already racked up" President Obama, July, 2011.

We, of course, face another debt limit battle early in 2014.

Perhaps a good place to start for the President is to propose
reductions in Federal spending equal to the bills that he has "racked
up". His contribution to the deficit has been through executive orders,
incompetent management by leaders of the executive branch (Obamacare
& Energy) and other decisions that strain any reasonable
interpretation of allowable executive powers under the Constitution of
the United States.

On the Obamacare front, the deferral of the employer mandate and now the
deferral of at least a significant portion of the individual mandate
will cost Treasury billions of dollars in 2014 and 2015.

These actions
were not authorized, approved or even discussed by Congress and the
Internal Revenue Code, which is the law, remains unchanged. In reality,
the elimination of these taxes (determined to be taxes by the Supreme
Court) would be ruled unconstitutional before any Federal judge if
'standing' within a Federal Court was available for any citizen to
challenge these actions of the President.

Continuing on the Obamacare front, the inability of the Treasury to
document and monitor the legal appropriateness of insurance subsidies
will cost the Treasury many more billions. The politically incented
exemptions granted by HHS will drive up the deficit; the subsidies
necessary to keep the insurance companies in business after the
demographic reality of the Obamacare signups becomes reality could cost
in the tens of billions. And of course, this website fiasco appears to
be costing billions as well. These costs come from the White House, not
Congress.

Another cost of Obamacare that has escaped discussion to date is the
deductibility of medical expenses on individual tax returns. As the
result of the regulations written by HHS, insurance costs for 2014 have
exploded along with deductibles required before insurance company
reimbursements kick in. This will increase medical costs for most
insured individuals by thousands. The good and the bad here is that
individuals receive tax deductions for medical expenses (including
medical insurance) exceeding ten percent of adjusted gross income. This
deduction, previously not often available because medical expenses were
almost always less than ten percent, will impact perhaps millions more
tax returns in 2014 and forward a significant cost to Treasury.

Last week, the Obama administration announced that they had sold its
remaining shares in General Motors at a loss of about $10.5 billion. The
bailout of General Motors was a White House operation.

The Treasury
Department reported that it had recovered $39 billion in stock gains and
interest from its $49.5 billion rescue. Transparency not being the
Treasury's strongest asset at the moment, this is only a portion of the
story.

The easy part of recognizing the real cost of the General Motors
transaction is that the Treasury bailed out General Motors with borrowed
money. Using an interest rate of 2.5% over four years means the bailout
cost the government about $5 billion. That would take the loss to $15.5
billion. The hard part to follow is that the White House awarded
General Motors tax benefits contrary to any reasonable reading of the
Internal Revenue Code that will convey a subsidy of about $16 to $20
billion to General Motors over the next two decades. (Of interest, any
future Secretary of the Treasury can challenge these tax benefits, but
no citizen has 'standing' to do so.)

How important are these tax benefits to General Motors? The most recent
balance sheet of General Motors has a book value (assets less
liabilities) of $37 billion. The book value of the tax benefits on that
balance sheet is now $36 billion. General Motors' net worth is
effectively equal to its tax benefits, most of which were conveyed to
General Motors by the White House.

The list of White House created costs includes many other White House
programs such as the vaunted investments in solar energy. The list of
other non-Congress approved expenditures is not endless, but very, very
long.

What the President cannot seem to understand or accept is that there is
nexus with respect to the costs of operating the government that are
coming out of the White House and not out of Congress. The White House
is expending funds and reducing taxes without Congressional involvement
and, in my opinion, without legal authority to do so. Maybe in
conjunction with lifting the debt ceiling, the President should be
required to find offsetting budgetary cuts equal to his executive orders
and other actions increasing the deficit that have occurred without
Congressional approval.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - The Fourth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Well we all knew this was coming didn't we as yesterday U.S. District
Judge William Pauley betrayed our Constitution by negating our right to
privacy as per the Fourth Amendment. And he did so with his ruling that
the National Security Agency's (NSA) 'sticking their nose into
our private business' phone-tracking program is indeed legal.

Negating the December 16th ruling that came down from U.S. District
Court Judge Richard Leon that stated the NSA's surveillance program is
actually unconstitutional, Judge Pauley justified his ruling by stating that
what the NSA is doing "represents the government's counter-punch" needed
to eliminate al-Qaida's terror network by connecting fragmented and
fleeting communications.

But didn't Obama say al-Qaeda is decimated and on the run...but I digress...

And so I say NO way to Pauley's ruling as all that needs to be done
is to listen in on those of a 'certain' ethnicity and 'certain'
religious persuasion...oh wait...that would be racial profiling wouldn't
it...the chief Obama political correctness no-no. Better the NSA spy
and invade the privacy of everyday innocent Americans than focus their
attention on those they know damn well are the only ones they need to
keep tabs on.

And so political correctness wins out yet again and 'We the People'
lose as there goes our Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and to be
protected against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Using the 'what
if' argument instead of adhering to the Fourth Amendment's 'probable
cause' wording in issuing his decision, Pauley dismissed a
lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of conservative legal activist Larry
Klayman (who wanting to turn the case
into a class action on behalf of all Americans) against both James
Clapper, the director of the NSA, and against the Justice Department. In
doing so, Judge Pauley claimed that if a phone data-collection system had been
used back in 2001 it could have "helped investigators connect the dots
before the attacks occurred" and possibly prevented them.

To which I say NO way as those determined to kill will always find a way to do so.

And
this snooping...this out and out spying on innocent Americans just in
case they might someday maybe get involved in criminal activity should
be blatantly in-your-face unconstitutional to anyone who has even a
moniker of understanding about our constitutionally given rights and
protections.

Sadly, Judge Pauley just does NOT get it as he continued that the
government learned from its previous mistakes and "adapted to confront a
new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the
world" and that the bulk data-collection program (data mining) was part
of that adjustment.

Pretty words that negate the very heart of the Fourth Amendment
as it dismisses the underlying premise of privacy and unreasonable searches and
seizures, thus allowing the Obama government in effect to initiate a police
state...to be Big Brother...and to iron fist rule over us all.

And the problem here is that Judge Pauley's ruling should NEVER have
happened but did because the previous ruling by Judge Leon (who was
appointed to the bench by Republican George W. Bush in 2002) was issued
as a preliminary injunction against the program, which is well and fine,
but then Leon stayed his injunction “in light of the significant
national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the
constitutional issues,” which allowed for an appeal by the Justice
Department, which they did post haste.

Judge Leon's ruling stated that the government "does not cite a
single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection
actually stopped an imminent attack'' yet in (Clinton appointee)
Pauley's ruling it states just the opposite.

“Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’
that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits
unreasonable searches and seizures, Leon said while Pauley stated that
15 separate judges on the surveillance court have held on 35 occasions
that the data collection program is legal. So the final ruling to
reconcile the two opposing decisions according to the ACLU...who plans
to appeal their case to the Second Circuit in Manhattan...could be
reached by the U.S. Supreme Court.

And if it does go to the Supreme Court we are in serious trouble
if Barack HUSSEIN Obama gets a chance to shift the now somewhat
conservative leaning court...somewhat conservative because we cannot be sure which
way Chief Justice John Roberts will rule...over to an outright liberal
leaning court by his being able to nominate new leftist judges to the bench.

And if that's the case 'We the People' are screwed big time as lost on
most of those currently sitting on the bench...and assuredly to be lost on any
Obama nominees to the bench...is the fact that NO one should be able to read
our letters, track our phone calls, or monitor our internet usage,
except if there is an undeniable and reasonable suspicion that we have
committed or are in the process of committing a crime...period.

And so as the Leon ruling vs. Pauley ruling works its way through the Appellate Court and maybe up to the Supreme Court, 'We the People' can only hope and pray that the right thing is done in the end and that the Constitution's words are honored...but I won't hold my breath that they are.

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I am an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. I am also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on RSP Radio at: https://streamingv2.shoutcast.com/right-side-patriots